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The emperor of middlebrow has no clothes! Phew. It feels
good to say it out loud. I speak as a recovering acolyte of documentary-maker
Adam Curtis, and after seeing the usual waves of adulation ripple across the
internet for the short
film he made for Charlie Brooker's 2014 Wipe, I'm worried a lot of
otherwise clear-thinking people might need some help speeding up their
convalescence.

Curtis, the patrician-voiced idol of men with computers
everywhere, seems to have fallen off with the vertiginous jolt of one of his
own jump-cuts. His narration of the five minute 2014 Wipe film begins:

“So much of the news this year has been hopeless,
depressing, and above all, confusing. And the response is 'oh dear'.”

As he outlines his thesis, the following phrases flash up
on the screen in block capitals:

The Big Bad in our “odd, non-linear world” is an apparently
new evil of managed, orchestrated confusion; sophisticated smoke and mirrors
from the main players on the political stage. The public's defeatist response
to this bewilderment, Curtis argues, has “become a central part of a new system
of political control”. This system of control consists of a few powerful and
mendacious propagandists spinning webs of media confusion to overwhelm and
subdue our puny brains – “the goal is to undermine people's perceptions of the
world,” he explains, as punchdrunk ambient sounds play underneath, “so we never
really know what is really happening”.

Now, which of those big 2014 news stories are confusing? A
few of them, perhaps – the situation in Ukraine is certainly complex; its
actors, their politics and their motives in different parts of the country are
a little obscure – but this is hardly unusual for a country in such turmoil.
The misdeeds of financiers are also pretty hard to fully understand (mostly
because they're boring, let's face it), for the majority of us without a
schooling in modern banking and its regulation – and sure, the besuited
warriors of neoliberalism get away with what they get away with in part
because their misdeeds are hard to understand. But look at the rest of that
list. The revelations of celebrity child abuse in the 1970s are horrific, but
what's confusing about the issue? What's confusing about the rise of ISIS,
exactly? What's confusing about phone hacking? What's confusing about the
scourge of ebola? What's confusing about the evolving science of nutrition?

More importantly, how are these organically-arising and
almost entirely unconnected world events being spun – by a few sinister modern
day Machiavellis, of whom only one is named--to bewilder and bedazzle ordinary
people?

The short segment detailing how Putin advisor Vladislav
Surkov used his training in avant-garde art to confound the public is very
interesting – if he really has been backing parties opposed to President Putin.
But is the notion of “bewildering theatre”, or “ceaseless shapeshifting”, from
one of Putin's many advisors, really the reason he has held power for 15 years?
It's not for the rather less exciting reason that Putin has been locking up and
intimidating dissidents, journalists and rivals and changing laws to his
advantage, like autocrats always do?

I'm not going to get into the montage style of his
documentaries, though this is crucial to understanding how Curtis hoodwinks
viewers into thinking he has all the answers. This note-perfect three-minute
YouTube parody does everything that needs doing – if you haven't seen it,
do watch it, it's as devastating a piece of deconstruction as when South Park
picked apart Family Guy's 'joke' format. There is one more critique of his work
that is incredibly eye-opening: Laurence Tennant's excellent piece on Curtis
and his links to the politics of Frank Furedi and the Living Marxism network. Tennant
gets at the nub of his appeal here:

“Curtis is only able to get away with this shit because his
fanboys fancy themselves way too clever to read things on their surface; they
have to be part of the exclusive in-group that always gets the deeper meaning,
and Curtis flatters them and leads them on.”

He appeals, in fact, to exactly the same desires for hidden
meaning as 9/11 truthers or other conspiracy theorists – look at the YouTube
comments on his documentaries, they're full of exuberant exultations that he is
the only one getting to the 'real truth'; the top comment on the 2014 Wipe film
begins: “I was gobsmacked this got through the Beeb Self-Censoring machine”.
Why haven't the Freemason-lizard-Zionists silenced him??? Astonishing. A decade
ago, I was a huge fan too. I loved The
Power of Nightmares and The Century
of Self, and loved them in part for exactly this reason – at last, here is
someone brave and smart enough to get to the 'real truth'. Eventually I found
myself wailing 'oh now hang on!' after one blazé non-sequitur or bizarre
generalisation too many. Curtis spends a lot of time talking about other
people's ideologies; here is Lawrence Tennant's observation on the politics of
the man himself:

"To read Curtis as a leftist, you have to assume he
spends much of his time being ironic or provocative — like when he's singing
the praises of Henry Kissinger or Enoch Powell, taking at face value that the
neocons wanted to spread democracy, saying "today it is possible to argue
that we have all become gay white negroes", or insisting that he's not a
leftist. But even read as irony or provocation, there's something off about his
films from a leftist perspective, like the way they eschew economic relations,
deny the agency of the mass of ordinary people in deciding their own fate, and
display zero interest in the welfare of capitalism's victims.”

This, to me, is the clincher on Curtis: he is fascinated by
the intellectuals, and thoroughly bored by the masses. Ordinary people are
without agency or distinction – in fact, they're just not there at all, except
in the occasional mass crowd scene: storming the gates, or praying, or
performing in a North
Korean arirang, like the drones they are. Let's hope the Charlie Brooker
short was just a bit lazy because he was busy with his soon-to-air new project:
a 140 minute documentary for BBC iPlayer which focuses heavily on Afghanistan.

“Afghanistan,” he writes in this
blog-trailer for the programme, “is the place that has repeatedly
confronted politicians, as their power declines, with the terrible truth - that
they cannot understand what is going on any longer. Let alone control it... I
have tried to build a different and more emotional way of depicting what really
happened in Afghanistan.”

This does not bode well – the catastrophe of Afghanistan's
recent history requires many things, but I'm not sure a more emotional
depiction of events is one of them. Perhaps Curtis might like to read this
excellent 9,443
word essay in the LRB by James Meek explaining the history and complexities
of the British role in the conflict, written by a journalist who spent time in
Afghanistan with British troops, no less. Or, perhaps he'd like to just use the
search function on the BBC internal archive and ask an assistant to clear the
rights for Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works? Afghanistan suits Curtis
because it gives him a chance to give two groups of people a kicking:
politicians, for not being able to understand, and journalists, for not being
able to explain (again, maybe he should read Meek?). His blog-trailer for the
BBC documentary takes on a sententious, Furedi-esque 'everyone's wrong but me'
aspect:

“And journalism - that used to tell a grand, unfurling
narrative - now also just relays disjointed and often wildly contradictory
fragments of information. Events come and go like waves of a fever. We - and
the journalists - live in a state of continual delirium, constantly waiting for
the next news event to loom out of the fog - and then disappear again,
unexplained. And the formats - in news and documentaries - have become so rigid
and repetitive that the audiences never really look at them.

In the face of this people retreat from journalism and
politics. They turn away into their own worlds, and the stories they and their
friends tell each other. I think this is wrong, sad, and bad for democracy -
because it means the politicians become more and more unaccountable.”

Politicians are increasingly unaccountable, sure, the
information age can be exhausting, sure, but this diatribe is baffling. Formats
have become rigid and repetitive? In the era of web 2.0, tablets,
crowd-sourcing, live-blogging, social media, Wikileaks and so on, his greatest
concern about news journalism is that too much is staying the same? And this
critique is not just baffling – it's pretty rich for Curtis to condemn anyone,
least of all journalists, for distributing “disjointed information”: his entire
career has become a series of grandiloquent homages to the art of non-sequitur.

Frankly, it's pretty rich for him to condemn journalists at
all, given the way he practices the profession. He is concerned, he says, for
'people'. He constantly talks about 'people' as an abstract group. 'People
retreat from politics', 'they turn away into their own worlds', he says.
There is never any data to prove the heft of these generalisations, about the
immeasurably complex and contradictory mass that is 'people', and there are
precious few interviews (especially original interviews) used to illustrate his
arguments. Allow yourself to dwell on this for a second: Curtis has the
glorious bounty of the entire BBC archives at his fingertips, he ranges across
continents and across decades in his subject matter, and which voice dominates
all of his programmes? Just one. The omnipotent narrator...

Adam Curtis rose to fame by documenting small cliques of
ideologues – most notably the American neoconservatives and Islamists featured
in The Power of Nightmares – who
sought to impose their all-encompassing doctrines onto a chaotic world. People
who sought to simplify world events into one single narrative, and do so to
their own benefit. Sound like anyone else you know?

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